KIA: Reducing losses

[Adler]

As i startes to play this game, I quickly learned that a false step with one of your soldiers is most likely equal with him dying. On the other hand, I used the retry button a lot and learned how I have to fight those battles to reduce the casualties.
I learned that smoke hides my soldiers from to be fired at. But as I moved too close to places where I neither reach enemies with my weapons nor see them, they just walked in the smoke and attacked my soldiers. In some cases setting fire can be helpful to block passages.
I thought most situations can be solved without losing soldiers (or at least can be minimized).

Now I had  a map (forgot the name) where I had to go down into a mine. It's like a labyrinth, with lots of holes to the different floors. It's hard to find cover and setting fire isn't that good as it seemed (a sheevar walked through fire to be able to shot one of my soldiers).
Do you have further tactics to reduce soldiers loss? Like throwing flashbang in hidden spots and advance with a scout to that spot?
What improved tactics you have?

By the way, is fire causing bleeding wounds?
 

[anonymissimus]

In 2.6 fire is now causing bleeding yes. And it can very well result in some sheevar doing nothing instead of killing a unit of yours, because it got its movement costs increased, leaving less points than planned. And they really have a strong urge to move through fire if it is useful for reaching an attack position. So, fire fields are a very useful weapon against sheevar and unarmored taman. It can also happen an already wounded sheevar moves through 6 fire fields and still makes a kill though. And civilians may also move through fire and will instantly die, so take care that none are between aliens and fire.

That map is "Old mine", a mean one where I loose almost all civilians most of the time. My strategy on such maps usually is to rush with lots of cannon fodder. Soldiers which are not very valuable, have little experience and which can very well be replaced, from a campaign point of view. On that map it doesn't work well most of the time since even with the speed boost the rush is too slow. Note that crashed UFO missions can be safely ignored without affecting nation happiness. An old mine mission with likely 12 aliens can only result in nation happiness loss so ignoring it may be better.

[kingchaos]

u can do alle missions without any loss (medium diff.).

Use fog/smoke to hide all you guys into it.

then scout with 1 or 2 fast soldiers and kill them with the guys in the smoke.

place reaction fire soldiers onto th edge of the fog/smoke and have them nightvision on. so they see the incoming aliens and get them out.

[kingchaos]

Now I had  a map (forgot the name) where I had to go down into a mine. It's like a labyrinth, with lots of holes to the different floors. It's hard to find cover and setting fire isn't that good as it seemed (a sheevar walked through fire to be able to shot one of my soldiers).
Do you have further tactics to reduce soldiers loss? Like throwing flashbang in hidden spots and advance with a scout to that spot?
What improved tactics you have?

the mine is not so difficulty, if you know that your nightvisiongoggles will work through the levels up and down.

u have to place your soldiers clever to scan the entire map.

when u know, where they are, u can reduce your loss to 0.

make only teams of 2 soldiers, because only 2 can stay next to each other.

try to use the shotscuts into the lower levels.

if u got heavy needlers, you can place 2 reactionfire soldiers for blocking all alien coming through a spezific way, even if the when an ortnok appears (i didnt tested this in the very hard mode.)